An essential element of leadership

 With the wisdom of hindsight, some leaders in history stand out: Churchill, Lincoln, Thatcher and Reagan are but a few. Zelensky in Ukraine and Netanyahu in Israel are currently facing the battle for their country’s lives as have others who went before them.

None of them was/is perfect. None had it easy. Yet all performed with moral clarity and courage of conviction to deal with the enormous challenges they confronted at the time of peak threat.

Winston Churchill

Ignorant callow youth wallowing in freedoms so hard won by the blood of forebears, who want to deface and destroy statues of Churchill because of some perceived affront in his, or his family’s past, nearly a century ago judged by today’s standards, have no idea of the challenges he confronted to hold spirits high and win victory against Hitler and rampaging Nazism.

 Churchill had to deal, alone, with German sympathisers, barely concealed antisemitism and appeasers at home, to envision with moral clarity the necessity of defeating Nazism to retain cultural freedoms enjoyed by Britain and the Commonwealth nations, then drive the effort forward to clear victory. Stupendous in fact! True leadership!

Churchill had been a soldier who experienced war at first hand. He not only knew his country’s cultural values and freedoms were at stake, but also what it took to win: total annihilation of the enemy. Moral clarity stirred the courage to pursue the only acceptable end.

Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln had little going for him in status, appearance or voice as did Churchill. What he did have was similar moral clarity of purpose – to unite the fledgling states of America. Having been elected, for two weeks he travelled by train from La Rue County in Kentucky, crisscrossing many of the eastern states towards Washington, stopping three and four times a day, to speak directly to the crowds of people who gathered. At all times he was under threat of assassination. Plain spun sincerity emanating from his rustic origins and his deep, sincere beliefs won people round, though not the elites. A lesson for us today.

Inauguration was not the end of travail. Once more Lincoln needed to draw on inner resources of courage and moral clarity to lead the Union against the southern states in a civil war to defeat slavery and lay the foundation for equal opportunity for Black people. It was a bitter and costly war through which Lincoln held true to his moral purpose – to unite the country. Reverberations are still felt today.

Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan

On election, both Thatcher, PM of Great Britain and Reagan, President of the USA faced challenging domestic issues as well as the Cold War with Russia, leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall and break-up of the Russian Empire.

Thatcher, a shopkeeper’s daughter, took on intransigent unions crippling the country to restore Britain’s economy. When the Irish Republican Army bombed the hotel in which the Conservative Party was holding its conference, Thatcher next day once more stood on the dais, moral clarity evident in her much- quoted phrase, “this lady is not for turning”. Again, Thatcher’s leadership shone when Argentina sought to take over the Falkland Islands, she acted decisively and was successful.

Reagan was a B-Grade actor turned Governor of California who won the 40^th Presidency of the United States. Hangover from his acting days was his mellifluous voice and ability to deliver a line or a joke certainly helped win support. Critics felt he was too old at 73, yet Reagan showed moral clarity to do what was best for the people and the country. In his first term, Reagan implemented “Reaganomics”, which involved economic deregulation and cuts in both taxes and government spending during a period of stagflation. He escalated an arms race and transitioned Cold War policy away from détente with the Soviet Union, pressure which brought the downfall of the Berlin Wall and fragmentation of the Soviet Union. A period of relative world peace ensued.

Volodymyr Zelensky

Although qualified as a lawyer, Zelensky became the 6^th President of Ukraine following a successful TV career which provided high profile and media skills beneficial for his present role.

Upon unprovoked invasion of Ukraine by Russia, Zelensky declined a US offer of escape, saying “the fight is here. I need weapons not a flight out”. That moral clarity to defend Ukraine has proven costly in manpower and munitions. Yet the people of Ukraine, whose previous experience of being under the heavy jackboot of Russian domination, which brought starvation and death of millions, remains fresh in their memory.

NATO support has been forthcoming as nations seek to avoid once again becoming part of dictator Putin’s dream of a reconstituted Russian empire, little different from Solzhenitsyn’s grim, totalitarian description of the Gulag Archipelago. Oppressive prospects sharpen the sense of moral clarity about what needs to be done.

Benjamin Netanyahu

Netanyahu boldly confronts the fight of his country’s life, assailed on so many fronts with threats of annihilation from evil actors in the region and hapless media abroad:

• Hamas in Gaza who massacred, tortured and raped over 1200 people, injured almost 5,000 and kidnapped 253 men, women and children on October 7, continues to use its own people as human shields.
• Hezbollah raining down thirty rockets a day on Israel from Lebanon, displacing almost 100,000 residents.
• Houthis from Yemen attacking Red Sea shipping and launching rockets into southern Israel.
• Iran which funds Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthi proxies, launched 350 missiles at Israel and strategically funds useful idiots in the west to swing public opinion against Israel and Jews through protest on Uni campuses, on the streets and disruption to economy and social harmony through street sit-ins. If only the useful idiots understood how they are being played. Should Iran be successful, its plan is to destroy western civilization. Those idiots will then have no right to protest, at least not without facing prison, torture and death. Ask the Iranians.
• Joe Biden, President of the US, who speaks out of both sides of his mouth, ostensibly supporting Israel in the fight for its life, yet anchoring that country’s ability to proceed with the speed and purpose necessary to defeat the enemy and return hostages.
• UN agencies, ICC and ICJ which aim to skewer Netanyahu and Israel for war crimes, allegedly starving Gazans who appear overweight with man-boobs in most images. In Gaza starvation always threatens – next month.
• Various other self-important politicians with no skin in the game, critical of Israeli action in the face of desperation.

In addition to dealing with external threats, within Israel, Netanyahu must deal with the machinations of an activist court trying to nail him, as well as pressure from hostage families who want him to do more to bring their loved ones home. Yet he has displayed Churchillian fortitude of an experienced soldier to hold his war cabinet together and proceed with confidence, courage and moral clarity towards initial stated goals of retrieving the hostages and destroying Hamas so that it no longer poses the threat promised to exterminate Israel and the Jews, who deserve and desire to live in peace.

Australian leadership

There is no way we can attribute the Australian government with moral clarity. With regards support for democracies of Ukraine and Israel, PM Albanese has been limp, still providing Hamas with funding through UNWRA despite UNWRA being exposed as intertwined with terrorist organisation Hamas.

We could expect a PM with moral clarity to have the backbone to challenge pro-Palestine/anti-Semitic protestors to abide by the laws of this country they hate, or else go back to somewhere they find more suitable – like Iran, Lebanon or Turkey. Alternatively, benefits and citizenship could be stripped. A PM of that calibre would glean more respect for the principle of standing up for this country, its values and what is right, rather than pandering to Islamist enclaves, who are emboldened by appeasement to their evil. Appeasement never works.

Business leaders’ virtue signaling support for the Voice has been callow and ill considered, as has been their dismissal of importance to shareholders and customers of Australia Day and Anzac Day. Woke yes, moral clarity, no.

Hope for the future

While domination by dictators and manipulation of the ignorant in the west is dismal, hope springs from the moral clarity expressed by particular commentators as they gain traction, drawing listeners to non-woke reality. Amongst these are:

• Douglas Murray, British author and journalist, who challenges Palestinian belief structures.
• Jordan Peterson, Canadian psychologist and author
• Eylon Levy, journalist, former representative of the Israeli government
• Mosab Hassan Yousef, son of the founder of Hamas, raised in Gaza, who spent ten years working for Israeli security, saving lives on both sides.
• Caroline Glick, podcaster and author
• Ricky Gervais, British comedian who disarms the woke with humour.

In Australia, we have a few, not limited to: plain speaking Senator Matt Canavan; TV commentators Peta Credlin, Andrew Bolt and Paul Murray; Senator James Patterson and Andrew Hastie; erudite philosopher and economist, Henry Ergas who has a Friday column in The Australian. Most of these are accessible on YouTube, as a change from their ABC bias, and a welcome dose of hope. Best to be informed with a diversity of views rather than joining the ranks of the rabid willfully ignorant out protesting for the thrill of joining the mob. Moral clarity derived from sound knowledge inspires courage and confidence to make right decisions and proceed.

Oppression indulged generates every increasing demands and concessions

Colonisers such as the British who laid claim to this land in 1788, establishing fair governance systems for all, are now viewed by activist elites as “oppressors”.

Original Aboriginal inhabitants and their descendants are conversely viewed as ever the “oppressed”. Colonisers grievously disrupted a romanticized ideal of the reality of short brutal lives of a nomadic culture and economy for an invitation to a more modern way of life with attendant benefits.

Like a good Catholic gift, guilt for harm believed to have been done to the “oppressed” over 240 years fostered grievance, demanding “voice, treaty truth”. Unlike Catholic guilt, there is no hope of redemption or forgiveness for those who make amends for things they didn’t do, so as a people we can move on together. Like a spoilt child’s demands, oppression indulged generates every increasing demands and concessions. Resentment and dissension simmer.

The failed 2023 Voice referendum demonstrated that Australians support equality for all through the Constitution, though not special racial concessions for less than 4% of the populationbeing forever factored into our governing document .

By taking a quick look at present policy and financial realities for Aborigines, we are able to see clearly that the “oppressed” are re-colonising land, sea and every aspect of Australian life, without so much as a vote for those expected to pay and be subject.

It is worth taking a closer look at the actual number of Aborigines and the scale of efforts by genuine well-meaning Australians to encourage fullest sharing in the country’s bounty.

Number of Aborigines

According to ABS estimates as of 30 June 2021 984,000 Aborigines were living in Australia, representing 3.8% of the total Australian population. Of these, between 50-100K are pure blooded, the remainder are mixed race claiming aboriginal status.

Indigenous ownership and control of land, water and sea

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are said to maintain a distinctive cultural, spiritual, physical and economic relationship with their land and waters.

At 15 Dec 2023 Australia’s Indigenous land and forest estate (2020) was calculated at 134 million hectares of land (17%). In addition, Local Aboriginal Land Councils (LALCs) can claim Crown Land, that is, land in NSW that is owned and managed by the State Government. LALCs can have land transferred to them in freehold title if at the time of the claim the land is, among other requirements: Able to be lawfully sold or leased. At the moment, without consultation, there is a claim for 95% of the town of Toobeah to become aboriginal freehold.

There are now 82 dedicated IPAs (Indigenous Protected Areas) that make up 50 per cent of Australia’s National Reserve System, covering a total of 87 million hectares. 

The 3.8% of the population claiming aboriginal status are therefore well placed as far as control of the landmass of Australia, as illustrated in the map below.

Business development and mining projects are regularly held up for years by (taxpayer funded) Aboriginal legal claims that progress disrupts sacred sites. As Aboriginal history is oral, or written in sand, unless there is physical evidence such as rock paintings, claims may be bogus, perhaps driven by Green activist manipulation. Two incidences of note are (1) the Hindmarsh Island bridge in SA, for years delayed owing to secret women’s business, admitted as fake when someone broke ranks; and (2) the Burrup Peninsula WA gas pipeline, on which legal claims disturbance of dreamtime spirits of the water 30k offshore (further than any indigenous boat could have travelled). Whatever!

The 1992 Mabo decision of the High Court granted Native Title to Murray Islanders. Flow on legal claims enabled other Aborigines to make legal claims (taxpayer funded) on traditional lands. Hence, we have been inundated with recognition of native lands (always was, always will be), ‘welcome to country’ and constraints on access by others (taxpayers). Sites now inaccessible include Uluru (Ayers Rock), the Grampians in Victoria, Mt Warning in Queensland, with geographic wonder horizontal falls in the Kimberley soon to be excluded.

Many places in Australia already have Aboriginal names, such as Bennelong Point site of the Sydney Opera House, named after Bennelong, an Aboriginal who was particularly helpful to the first Governor Philip. Others are being renamed such as K’gari (Fraser Island), with many towns and cities, including major cities like Brisbane, which have been established post-settlement. Soon we will not know where we are or where we are going.

Services and Supports for Aborigines

And that is not all. WA’s Heritage Laws require Aboriginal approval to dig a ditch, plow a field, build a fence. Of course, like all other contrived latter-day rituals and ceremonies, the applicant must pay for approval, or be subject to heavy penalty.

In addition to control of lands, those claiming aboriginality are currently serviced by 11 elected federal representatives and 14 Indigenous-specific bodies at the Commonwealth level, of which the National Indigenous Australians Agency (NIAA) is the largest, plus 4 statutory office holders. Of the 14 bodies, 13 are part of the Prime Minister and Cabinet portfolio. (17 Nov 2023) State and local government and land councils are additional to federal provisions.

Financial support

Through Services Australia, Aborigines can access the following payments, some of which are broadly available to all Australians:

• Parenting Payment
• JobSeeker Payment
• Carer Allowance
• Age Pension
• ABSTUDY
• Crisis and special help
• Family and domestic violence and more, such as:
• travel to a funeral
• travel and accommodation when selected in a representative sporting team
• sporting team’s uniforms
• one off training or licence fees
  • Forklift training and licence
  • Fishing licence
  • Truck license and more….

Under the Indigenous Advancement Strategy (IAS), grants may be proposed for community led proposals such as:

• Building a community centre
• Developing a sporting ground
• Establishing a community radio station
• Community memorials
• Cultural festivals
• Sporting festivals
• Sporting teams
• Dance groups
• Memorial services
• Environment groups
• Local grants to enable communities to host their own events to celebrate NAIDOC week

Education and training supports include long-term support for study costs and housing where a student travels for tertiary education; Commonwealth scholarships of $5,000 year to undertake an Approved Course of Study in one of 10 specified regional areas; employment grants to fund traineeships and cadetships.

In addition, every project for which business tenders for government work includes mandatory requirements to employ Aborigines and provide skills training. Business is implicitly expected to do the government’s job.

Favourable loans are available for housing, business, language and arts projects, as well as Native Title applications.

Recent aboriginal industry developments

• Flags: Aboriginal flag was designed in 1970 by Luritja man, Uncle Harold Thomas. The federal government recently paid $20m for copyright. Now the flag stands alongside the Torres Strait Islander flag, beside the national flag, behind the Prime Minister.
• Smoking ceremonies, burning gum leaves practiced by Aborigines for eons to cleanse people and places precedes many national public and sporting events
• Welcome to country and acknowledgement of Aboriginal land precedes every major occasion and is repeated ad nauseum by every presenter at every woke presentation at every woke event – a bit rich when attendees pay $thousands to glean information at an industry conference. Particularly galling when followed by “always was, always will be aboriginal land”.
• Recognition of elders, past, present and emerging, fails to recognize elders of immigrants to this land who have built the cities, homes, industry, farms and mines that fund indulgence.
• Dot painting originated 40 years ago back in 1971 when Geoffrey Bardon was assigned as an art teacher for the children of the Aboriginal people in Papunya, near Alice Springs. He noticed whilst the Aboriginal men were telling stories they would draw symbols in the sand.  
  Bardon encouraged his students to paint a mural based on traditional dreamings on the school walls. The murals sparked incredible interest in the community. He incited them to paint the stories onto canvas and board.  Soon many of the men began painting as well. The paintings often contain secret, sacred understandings.

 Education

Education is where the black-arm band version of history really hits its straps. Colonialism is taught as evil, destructive of aboriginal culture. Or else, children are fed the notion of Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu rubbish. Pascoe claims nomadic Aborigines built houses and villages and cultivated crops, all soundly debunked by anthropologist Peter Sutton and archeologist Keryn Walshe. Both authors argue Pascoe ignored evidence that did not fit his case while over-emphasising evidence that did. Painting white stripes on a pale Pommy does not make him an Aboriginal, although the ABC and educators still believe. Never let facts get in the way of a pot of gold.

As maths and science are now deemed “racist” and “oppressive” learning maths is now taught by aboriginal dance and aboriginal science, whatever that is. Closing the Gap will be achieved as today’s students are dumbed down to meet “oppressed” standards.

Aboriginal Events and Celebrations

Many of these events are taxpayer funded:

1. 26 January, Survival Day (Australia Day to us)
2. 13 February, anniversary day of the apology to Australia’s indigenous peoples. Personally, I’m hanging out for an acceptance of apology along with the grace of forgiveness so we can move on, but of course forgiveness derives from Judeo-Christian traditions and may be colonial.
3. 20 March, Harmony Day
4. 21 March, Close the Gap Day
5. 26 May, National Sorry Day
6. 27 May, Anniversary of the 1967 Referendum
7. 27 May-3 June, National Reconciliation Week
8. 29 May, Torres Strait Islander Flag Day
9. 3 June, Mabo Day
10. 1 July, Coming of the Light
11. 4-11 July, National NAIDOC week
12. 4 August, National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children’s Day
13. 9 August, International Day of the world’s indigenous peoples
14. 30 August-4 September, Indigenous Literacy Week

In addition, there is:

• Garma Festival, Australia’s largest Indigenous gathering, a 4-day celebration of Yolngu life and culture held in remote northeast Arnhem Land.
• Aboriginal Media, NITV and radio
• In sport, special aboriginal rounds of competition, featuring aboriginal designs on kit.

Health and services

Special aboriginal health services are delivered by providers who put their life on the line to advance aboriginal wellbeing.

Financial investment in aboriginal wellbeing

Bulk of the estimated $34billion/year invested in aboriginal advancement includes cost of services and supports commonly available to all Australians, as well as around $6billion aboriginal specific programs (49 federal, 236 State and Territory and 797 non-government organisations), part funded by government, according to a 2016 report, Improving the effectiveness of Indigenous policy, by Sara Hudson of the Centre for Independent Studies).

Although the report is a little dated, conditions do not appear to have changed, as Senator Jacinta Price from Alice Springs rails. Thousands of pages of reports, major taxpayer expense, little real accountability. Hudson reported confusion reigns when a town like Roebourne in WA with a population of 1,150 had 67 local service providers and more than 400 programs funded.Yet despite service intensity, Roebourne was also the focus of Operation Fledermaus in 2018 when 224 children were identified as alleged victims of sexual abuse, one 58 year old charged with abuse of 45 girls aged under 13.

Time for a sunset clause to be factored into every special Indigenous program, to cut out with:

• Non-performance, non-accountability
• After one year, three years, five years
• All ceasing after 20 years – one generation – by which withdrawal of taxpayer funds can be viewed as an invitation to join the real world of individual responsibility and contribution like they claim for 60,000 years, rather than as an oppressed, helpless victim like a Gazan resident.

Not all those claiming aboriginality are welfare dependent. Around 65% have jobs, businesses and houses and operate in the wider world like other Australians. Elite activists cynically leverage the disadvantage button, often for their own advantage, without dealing with the hard scrabble of remote dysfunction.

What’s good about colonisation

Pushback has begun. While risking de-platforming and criticism as a “panicky white bro” and “busy recycler of Western supremacism”, Professor Bruce Gilley’s 2017 article and later 2023 book elaborates The Case for Colonialism. Gilley asserts that critics have no evidence for their claims and the case for colonialism is robust no matter which colonizer or colonized area one examines. Gilley presents his case in a patient, empirical and humorous way, somewhat exasperated with the anti-colonial tropes. Colonisers, Gilley states, created all the infrastructure of the economy and reparations may be due in reverse. Now there’s a thought.

Perhaps as we in Australia are recolonised by the 3.8% of the population who claim a smidgen of Aboriginality, we may be able to examine the benefits of mindlessly subjecting ourselves to takeover at great cost. At least it will be practice for when the Chinese arrive.

The title for this blog is attributed to an observation by Barry Jones, former Science Minister in the Hawke Labor government. Jones vigorously encouraged schooling to Year 12, higher uptake of university qualifications and seeded innovation through the Cooperative Research Centre Program to achieve much more from our research dollars. Yet the title applies to reality for many young.

Thirty years of continuous economic prosperity allowed Australians to indulge their children after austerity and scarcity of the war and post war eras. What’s not to like about planning/shopping for a gift for a beloved child or grandchild. Get thrills out of it myself just in case it is the last thrill.

Yet it’s not just the gifts, which are plentiful and diverse: it’s the trend to constant entertainment – in theme parks, water parks, themed parties, musical events, meals out, TV and screens that leave little time for being alone, to enjoy the experience of thinking, reflecting in gratitude, resolving, learning resilience, be imaginative, creative that raises concerns in older people. All that without accounting for the cost.

We know that the education system is failing 30%-40% of children who emerge illiterate and innumerate from 12 years of learning, so hard pressed for by Barry Jones.  In any business that would be considered gross failure. Jones didn’t foresee the decline into wokeism and leftist ideology that has corroded his noble ambitions and now dominates the learning environment.

Consequences

Just as every child wins a prize, no one misses out. Totally lost is the value of experiencing realities of a competitive world that challenge a child to direct interests to something more suitable elsewhere, to strive for achievement in a field more suited to talent and interest.

According to psychologists / theologians J D and E E Whitehead, in their book Christian Life Patterns, “competition and cooperation in work and play aid the development of self-awareness, self-assurance, testing and affirmation of strengths and weaknesses, flexibility, creativity, teamwork, advocacy, conflict resolution, negotiation and planning”.

Competition is therefore a crucial element of development of personal maturity, by which a young person begins to understand his/her own strengths and capabilities, to become a mature person. Disappointment properly understood can be turned into a valuable, more generative change in life’s direction. Especially if time is taken to work through specific implications.

Time set aside to reflect and savour a particular gift or experience, or time out, is as rare a commodity as listening skills in an era of constant stimulation. Resilience born of self-reliance can only develop from experience lived and understood. Fewer stimulating events and gifts could be balanced by opportunities for creating a grateful spirit, satisfied with what one has, rather than what one might have missed out on. In quieter moments, parents can lead reflection on the gifts and the givers, as well as how they can be used as a force for good.

Perhaps a more damaging consequence is an inability to concentrate on a task, a person or an experience, to listen, to understand the importance and so appreciate value. Being able to complete a task and enjoy the satisfaction of achievement is a crucial capability in character development. Bob Proctor asserts Excellence is the commitment to completion – a reminder to finish off tasks, providing an example and experience for children to do likewise.

Parental responsibility

While the child rightly claims total care at birth, by age 18 years, the young adult carries full responsibility for its life choices in keeping with civic law. Parental tasks today are to weave their way through the minefield of rapid changes in values and opportunities, decline in social cohesion and vagaries of work/home tensions, to lead their offspring to productive adulthood.

Important in those tasks is providing the child with a growing sense of its place in family and community, made more difficult with practices adopted, seemingly wholesale, from Dr Spock’s post WWII book Baby and Child Care. Spock recommended a kinder more child-centred method of care than former authoritarian customs.

Good ideas usually get taken too far, as was Spock’s. Where the child is ever the centre of the family, context essential to good decision-making is betrayed. Reality is derived by learning to be part of a family, able to consider others (parents, siblings, grandparents, etc.) whose needs become priorities from time to time.

Expecting children occasionally to defer to others provides the child with experience in knowledge, empathy and understanding of the needs of others in relation to themselves. Being able to achieve a modicum of capability in this element of parenting advances both parent and child on the way to attaining the goal of productive young adult, one fit for work, study and relationships. Parents also advance in maturity. Otherwise, both parent and child become locked into a state of immaturity with high social, emotional and financial costs, payment deferred till adulthood when the world bites back with uncomfortable reality.

Making experiences rich

Everyone has their own observations and ideas about what to do. I can only suggest a few of mine aimed at expanding the memory, language and knowledge of the child. These might include:

• Plan fewer gifts and events: and spend more time savouring the experience, with reflections, gratitude and ideas for other possibilities.
• Trade for time: Instead of a gift enclose cash in a card (while cash still has currency) with the requirement of a discussion on purchase, using the opportunity to learn more about the child, and likewise expect them to learn more about you as part of their history.
• Follow up gifts with enquiry about how they were used and what difference the gift made, again expanding responsibility of the child to respond to expectations as being an important part of a family and community, which cannot be known if the child is always the centre of attention.
• Generate conversation about the child’s experiences of outings and events, to build up language, conversation and memory skills. Ask them to write about it where they are able to do so.

Most parents and grandparents do their utmost to keep their children on a positive trajectory. Temptations to be child-directed arise with demanding claims “I’m bored” or “everyone has one”, cause parents to scurry to “make the child happy”. Occasions such as these present an opportunity to double down, challenging the child to draw on inner resources to satisfy the complaints gap by getting creative on the way to an enriching experience.

In effect, the children’s demands challenge us to be the adult in charge. We must be sure to show that we are.

Keep Learning

Best way of maintaining competence in choosing options is to be open to keep learning.

Being open to learning new ideas has become a way of life for me, allowing me to appreciate and capitalize on innovation, benefits and new people who chance along.

In doing so I’ve been able to learn things I wish I’d known 50 years ago. In rehab after surgery, I learned techniques for controlled sitting and standing safely, to walk rolling one’s foot from heel to toe to exercise the leg muscles pumping blood to the heart, how to climb stairs and other techniques for strengthening balance to avoid falls and damaging injury.

Other simpler things apply:

• Keep the phone and other essentials reachable from your chair.
• Stablise balance when first standing, before stepping out. Know a few who’ve fallen and broken limbs incurring hospital stints and long, painful rehabilitation.
• Let go of household detritus that form granny traps. Good environmental practice keeps circulating material things no longer useful, as well as consideration for those left behind when you pass on. Many would need an army to clean up the hoarding. A cluttered setting clutters the brain, precluding clarity of thought and best options, especially when the brain is already becoming somewhat befuddled. Real virtue is found in letting go, taking forward only what’s needed for the future.
• Buy minimally, only what you will use.
• Have a plan for how to manage end of life health and housing issues. Written down is best.
• Take your funeral photo early: best when you’re fresh and well, not sick and dying.

Choosing Options

My hard road to staying in charge of my own life and circumstances, which becomes perilous in later years as diminishments encroach, was paved with practicalities.

The way out of poverty, chaos and dysfunction of my childhood, I determined, was to deal with reality, rationally framing an issue in terms of choice, responsibility and expectations. My Maturity Model for decision-making is the result. Using the model, situations, issues and relationships can be assessed, independently of others’ opinions, so that any choices can confidently be made as best for me.

For elderly, often rank confusion reigns as crises and people crowd in. Priorities are hard to sort for best options. Perhaps none is our responsibility any longer. We are free to let go and there is virtue in doing so.

Material things aren’t the only clutter. As we enter the later stages of life, we need to consider whether we carry forward unnecessary responsibilities for people and situations that should have been let go, so they too can “grow up”.

We are living longer than previous generations, generally in better health, but not without troubles. Some elderly lifetime givers are reluctant to ask for assistance, thereby depriving following generations of the same chance to be responsible and generous, as they must if they are to mature.

In my diminishments, following surgery and moving, certain needs arose. By making discrete enquiries of a number of younger people, I found cheerful and willing responses. Marvellous! I feel so blessed and grateful. Furthermore, I have evidence of their efforts to treasure for the rest of my life.

A way of going

Everyone is free to choose their own way of going, until, of course, they can’t, when cognitive acuity dips. At least we aren’t leaders of the free world, with our diminishments for all to see, like Joe Biden, who should stick to icecream.

Should you prefer to stay in charge of your own life and circumstances as far as that is feasible, then there are some practical suggestions:

• Be honest about declining capabilities and limitations and engage help.
• Be honest about feelings (at least to yourself); it helps to make decisions.
• Let go of things, people, responsibilities that are beyond current scope.
• Ask simply and be a gracious receiver of kindness you would have shown others.
• Be grateful for a long life: so many have been denied the privilege.
• Go cheerfully as possible into the future, assured of the value of your contribution to this life.
• Feel blessed.

Confluence of Aboriginal and Palestinian grievance of dispossession and oppression.

Not long after the sham of the Voice referendum, Australia Day came and went with the usual protests about “invasion”, grievance and injustice tending to dominate the airwaves by the same activist mobs, high on emotion, yet ignorant of history. Diminishing celebration of the nation also came from virtue signaling corporates like Woolies, Cricket Australia, AFL and local councils.

What was different in this year of 2024 was the confluence of aboriginal grievances with those of Palestinians, now suffering in the war on Gaza, as Israel seeks to destroy the Hamas terrorist organization and retrieve its hostages kidnapped by the terrorists in a barbaric killing raid on 7 October 2023.

Both Aborigines and Palestinians which fester long-standing claims of grievance against colonial ‘masters’ can marshal large rallies of sympathisers to promote their cause, fly their identity flags, wave their placards, chant their slogans seeking reclamation of land and destruction of the “colonisers” from the river to the sea.

In each case large bureaucracies funded for betterment by the hated “colonisers” have grown exponentially to service the demands of the mendicant audiences. Despite $billions invested in the grievance causes, solutions are as rare as accountability of the bureaucracies, which milk sympathy for the cause to increase reach. Afterall, first rule of bureaucracy is never solve the problem: you’d be out of a job. Expansion means a career path is assured.

Capture of the agency by the target audience assures the agency of longevity: criticism can readily be thwarted politically, as immoral, “racist” and lack of sympathy for alleged grievances.

Aboriginal industry

In the lead up to the referendum, aboriginal Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price highlighted this very issue. Her people suffer from bureaucratic inertia, high cost and ineffectualness of policy initiatives, showing little progress despite the investment of over $34b/annually for over 50 years. Price is pressing for a comprehensive audit of government agencies, Land Councils and community organisations vested with responsibility for delivering results in aboriginal improvement, yet failing. Taxpayers willing to support aboriginal advancement, Price believes, are entitled to better value. We should get behind the Senator’s efforts.

The tail very much wags the dog. In the synthesized dance between Aborigines and their representative agencies, the discrimination of low expectations ensures the audience is relieved of any responsibility (to get the kids to school learning ready, clean the houses provided, get a job where feasible, provide adequate nutrition, give up the grog, ganga and gambling). Continuation of the problem and funding is assured. In return, bureaucrats gain a high salary, career path and privileged positions as experts at relevant talk fests. No pressure.

Much of aboriginal grievance is based on inevitable colonization of Australia by the British and waves of immigrants which followed. Certainly, mistakes were made for which we have been willing to acknowledge and make good. Absent is any sense of gratitude for the benefits ensuing that fund their grievance and means to promote it: universal language and law, extended term and quality of life no longer having to rely on nomadic culture and economy, financial endowment, restoration of land rights over around 55% of Australia and growing (other Australians are locked out of Uluru, the Grampians, Mt Warning), conservation of languages, their own media, high profile celebration of sporting greats in British games, recognition of high achieving academics in western universities.

For the rest of the country hungry for aboriginal success, the voice referendum seemed to pass a tipping point for in-your-face saturation of aboriginal grievance, without recognition of the reparations or acceptance of apologies. Smoking ceremonies, secondary flags, welcome to country, recognition of elders and chants, like the Palestinians, always was, always will be aboriginal land, contradicts the money-earning welcomes to country. We’re over it. As the Buddhist Teaching No. 12 says, the greatest gift in life is acceptance and forgiveness. After 236 years of grievance, no matter how well founded, is time to move on. If it wasn’t the British, it would have been the French, who arrived in Botany Bay a mere five days after Captain Philip’s convoy.

Time also for the ill-informed, historically illiterate media to cease partisan division orchestrated on every issue. White people are not always wrong and black people are not a species to be protected from doing or being wrong.

Palestinian industry

Exposure this week of UNWRA (United Nations Works and Refugee Agency) operatives as complicit in Hamas’ massacre and kidnap of Jews on 7 October, holding hostages and allowing Hamas to steal truckloads of food, water and medicines intended for “refugees”, shows just how seriously under capture by Hamas UNWRA has become.

For decades UNWRA Watch has been drawing attention to the capture by Hamas and the corruption: only evidence of outrageous behaviour has attracted scorn. Of UNWRA’s 30,000 staff, as many as ten percent of 13,000 Gaza personnel are estimated to be involved with Hamas. A dozen have been sacked, an internal investigation launched and many countries contributing over $1billion annually have suspended funding. A humourous YouTube video, Gaza’s sky is black but Qatar is always sunny can be enjoyed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OUMl58i4m0w. The video exposes the reality of billionaire leaders of Hamas living it up in Qatar, cynically calling for more deaths for donations.

Initially, UNWRA was established by the UN specifically to service the 600,000 Arabs displaced in post WWII partition which established Israel in 1947 and Arab initiated wars immediately afterwards. Land offered to Arabs was rejected by them and is to this day, so there is no “state” of Palestine.

Another agency (UNHCR) has responsibility for tending the needs of the millions of other refugees in the rest of the world, with the aim of gaining placement to move on with their lives. Arabs have grown in number to 2.3 million in the Gaza strip, which 77 years on, lucratively still call themselves refugees. Around the same time (1947), displacement of 15 million Hindus and Muslims in the partition of India resulted in the establishment of two countries: Pakistan and (now) Bangladesh. No longer do they consider themselves refugees.

An ASK video series published on YouTube interviewing Palestinians of all ages about possible solutions to the conflict with Israel, invariably quote that “the Jews must leave their land”, no question of living in peace alongside Jews. Never mind Jews’ continuous residency over centuries and the purchase of vacant desert and swamp land in Israel as pogroms and holocaust exterminated and drove them from Russia, Poland, Europe, Middle East and north Africa.

Prior to WWII the Arabs were Germany’s natural friends because they had the same enemies as had Germany, namely the English, the Jews and the Communists. Arab leader Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini spent time with Hitler and offered Arab support for the war effort, enjoining plans for the extermination of the Jews. Defeat of Germany in north Africa put a spanner in Arab plans for an enduring alliance with Germany, but not plans for extermination of Jews, which became further entrenched. Arab pogroms against Jews in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, like 7 October, have decimated or totally eliminated Jewish communities in Arab countries.

History shows that hatred of Jews and desire to exterminate them predates establishment of the modern state of Israel. Though land is now the chosen focus, it is not the cause of conflict. Evil in Arab hearts driven by Islamic ferrvour and denial of historical fact is to blame, compounded by permanent grievance festering under UNWRA, under capture by the people it was set up to serve.

Time is up for Palestinian elected Hamas and unelected bureaucrats of UNWRA who support and collaborate with them.

Time is up too, for the multitudinous agencies of the Aboriginal industry grown fat and useless at taxpayers’ expense to the detriment of disadvantaged Aborigines.

Australians and the world would rejoice if both Palestinians and Aborigines would ‘pick up their beds and walk’. They are victims only of their own choosing, not Jews or other Australians. Everyone would rejoice in their success. Yet to achieve success there must be reconciliation of the concept of “stolen land”, colonization and oppression, to deal with today’s reality of good will, generous support and assistance, to enable them to move on from grievance and victimhood by taking charge of responsibility for their own lives, as they showed capability in previous eras.

Sovereignty as a nation, or First Nations, as Aborigines have fancifully taken to calling themselves, means looking after your own people, not permanent and growing mendicity, reliance on donors and taxpayers and endless blame. Leaders must step up, not as happens just to grow rich on generosity and sympathy of others, but to lead their people to awareness of their own part in their situation and potential for solutions. Lack of awareness being the greatest weakness in life (Buddha).

Then we can all live in harmony. Know I’m dreaming.

When the horror and scale of the holocaust was exposed to the world after World War II, those remaining of the Jewish people after six million of them had perished in Hitler’s death camps determined Never again!

Beliefs of the Jewish people in faith, family, freedom and value of human life do not sit comfortably with the Isms (Fascism, Communism, Marxism, Islamism), each of which is based on autocratic central control of the masses, honouring jihad, death and martyrdom.

While many Jews had been exiled from the holy lands by various invasions of Romans, Muslims and Ottomans, some had continued living there as low-class Dhimmis, largely untroubled so long as they kept a low profile under Islamic constraints.

For Never Again to become a reality, the Jewish people realized they would have to become a nation state, with rights, within its own borders, able to build an economy and an army to defend themselves, given the reluctance of other nations to support or defend them.

Britain, the much-maligned colonizer that drove abolition of slavery, having defeated the Ottoman Turks in WWI, proposed the Balfour Declaration to establish Israel as a state in the holy lands, in 1947, under a UN declaration.  Regions were offered for a “Palestine” state but declined by Arabs. To this day, there is no Palestinian state because the Muslims still will not accept Jews, those descendants of monkeys and pigs, living in the region (or anywhere). Hence the genocidal mantra from the river to the sea.

War was declared on Israel on the very day the UN granted statehood. Ever since, there has been an intermittent cycle of wars, intifadas and attacks on Jews and Israel that have been won by Israel. Land won by Israel out of conflict has been conceded for peace. With each attack, resolve to defend their people and their state stiffens; their spokespeople articulate, impressive, forthright – from the PM, Ambassadors to the UN and Britain. Elon Levy for the PM’s office puts Biden’s KJP to shame. Even soldier Yair Pinto giving daily updates from the battlefield has it all over the lies and propaganda pushed out by Hamas to play to latent global, ill-informed antisemitism.

Bibi

I’ve just finished reading Benjamin Netanyahu’s autobiography (Bibi: My Story), which turns out to be a gripping virtual history of Middle East politics. Bibi is the second of three sons of Hebrew academic Benzion Netanyahu and his wife Cela. Each of the sons performed heroically in the Unit (similar to our SAS); Bibi was seriously wounded in a hostage retrieval and eldest Yoni killed leading the successful rescue of 100 hostages from a high-jacked plane from Entebbe, Uganda. So, Bibi, unlike many leaders, knows personally what it is like to have to fight an existential war, as well as the consequences.

Adding to his impeccable English, Bibi became engrossed with technological innovation while studying at MIT in the USA and working with Boston Consulting Group and RIM Industries. Such capabilities fitted with Israel’s needs when first he became PM. Bibi was speedily able to turn around the economy to one of innovation and investment essential to a small country, mostly desert, with few natural resources. Today, of 1,000 “Unicorns” (new startups worth more than $1billion) in the world, 100 are in Israel. Israel’s many start-ups are exploring all areas of tech innovation – food, financial, energy, agriculture, water, health, security and aviation to name a few – with the biggest possibilities in “deep tech”. Thank them for cherry tomatoes.

Hamas would destroy all this from their tunnels, to be replaced with what? Strict autocratic government by some religious Mullah issuing edicts from an unreformed Quran, which dishes out death or 74 lashes to a woman who doesn’t wear a hijab correctly?

Hamas

Hamas is a declared terrorist organization that has ruled the Gaza strip since Israel ceded control of the land from Egypt, withdrawing all Jewish people in 2005. Instead of creating a “Singapore of the Mediterranean” to bring enterprise, prosperity and peace to the Arab citizens, Hamas built a sub-terranean tunnel network under hospitals, homes, mosques and kindergartens, from which to strike terror upon their own civilians and Israelis. Armaments were prioritized over alms.

On their own admission, Hamas relies on international donations from countries like ours which they hate, and the UN, which they milk for money, sympathy and antisemitic propaganda.

Of the tens of millions of refugees displaced by the first and second world wars, second, third and fourth generation Arabs living in Gaza are the only ones still claiming refugee status 80 years on. Most refugees who settled elsewhere call themselves German, American or Australian and have moved on with their lives. Instead of living, as the dishonest tropes go, in ‘an outdoor prison’, under ‘genocide’, ‘starved of food, medicine, power and water’. Why haven’t they moved to Turkey or Iran which control them as Hamas does.

Palestinians are so disdained as troublemakers by other Arab nations that no one has offered to open their doors to take them in. Egypt has kept tight control over the Rafah crossing from Gaza. Even Kuwait expelled 300,000 Palestinian guest workers when they created havoc as Iraq invaded. Quietly, Arab countries seem to be hoping that Israel completes the job of destruction of Hamas as relief for them all, while making appropriate Arab comments publicly.

After Hamas

Just as coalition forces sought to destroy ISIS so they had no country from which to wreak terrorist havoc on the lives of innocent civilians going about their lives, so Israel must destroy and discourage Iran’s proxies Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthis who confront them on all fronts. Advantage for the coalition was that ISIS had control of land thousands of kilometres away: for Israel, Gaza is next door.

Furthermore, in breach of human rights, Hamas cowardly uses its own people as human shields, operating from a complex underground tunnel system beneath protected facilities like hospitals and schools, fudging statistics of lives lost, milking global propaganda from useful idiots with their deaths.

When one of Hamas own rockets misfired into the car park of Al Shifa hospital, immediate claim was that Israel had bombed the hospital killing 500 people, mostly women and children. The story went global in no time, yet the hospital remains standing, without retraction of the story. Two thousand Hamas rockets have misfired, killing many of their own people, attributed of course, to Israel. Never let the facts get in the way of a good story.

Every death is a tragedy. Death, martyrdom and destruction so highly prized by Hamas could stop immediately, should Hamas surrender and return all the hostages still held. Having started the war, they could end it, yet choose not to. That leaves Israel no option but to fulfil its democratic duty to protect its citizens from Hamas’s promised repeat massacres until all Jews are pushed into the sea. No other option. Would that there were members of our government with the stiffness of resolve for the awful task they face already shown by so many.

What will 2024 bring?

Traditionally at this time I wish my readers a Happy New Year and talk about back to school and work plans. Regardless of troubles in the world, each of us must still get about our daily lives, with dreams to be fulfilled.

This year I’d like to see a reckoning for the horror of Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthis, their leaders living in billionaire luxury in Qatar, as well as for Iran, puppet master of their terrorist barbarity.

My wishes extend to reform of Islam from a religion of violence and hatred, especially towards Jews (we’re next), to one of peace, respect for individuals and neighbourliness. May they accept that Jews are no longer Dhimmis, subjugated to a greater Islamic empire of centuries ago, but a source of knowledge and innovation that can be shared today.

Also, I wish that we in the west refrain from the laziness of moral equivalence that views a democratic state (Israel) defending its right to exist as the same as a terrorist entity (Hamas) whose holy values demand jihad against infidels, death and martyrdom.

For those interested, Ben Shapiro provides a useful potted history of the situation on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEoVzKyD_IM

Tell me I’m dreaming.

We know that with every new life comes celebration. Parents have hopes and dreams for their newborn infants – that they may become Prime Minister, Pope or outrageously prosperous to support parents in their later years.

Few could imagine that after 2,000 years their child’s birth will still be celebrated, as we celebrate the birth of the Jewish baby, Jesus’, lowly birth in Bethlehem all that time ago.

Yet the strength of the Judeo-Christian traditions from which our values of love, equality and respect for all have been born, sustain today, if somewhat battered by woke, indifference and outright hatred. Christmas is a reminder to rekindle the spirit of hope and joy inherent in the message. We can do so by reclaiming the innocence and simplicity of a child to strengthen our resolve for difficulties confronting us in the future.

Nurturing Innocence

So much concentrated care and effort must be invested by parents to traverse the early stages of childhood to encourage development and conserve innocence and simplicity.

Last year I received a video of my three little grandsons under five discussing wisely while preparing snacks for Santa. Early Christmas morning the video shows them creeping down the stairs in excited anticipation to see what Santa had brought. The mess he left from the snacks was commented on and wonder about his escape through the skylight, for which “we need a builder”.

Pure joy accompanied the opening of presents to find much wished-for gifts, showing Santa had rewarded them for being good. Such delicious fantasy to fill innocent young hearts and minds! Give me a heartful of that!

Maintaining Childhood

Nurturing innocence in children has become fraught, as indoctrination replaces education in so many educational institutions, woke, gender fluidity, global environmental catastrophe and evils of colonialism fill the curriculum. Children become terrified, loaded with guilt for matters beyond their understanding or control, and depressed as they are robbed of truth and the means to seek it. Innocence is lost and with it hope.

A pox on those Herod-like apologists designing and delivering such a curriculum, while overseeing rapid decline in literacy, numeracy and social skills. Daily robbing children of their due entitlement may not equate with King Herod’s killing of all male Jewish babies, though killing off learning and hope is little better as lives are diminished.

Taking a cue from John the Baptist, parents and teachers are not self-appointed gods; they are challenged to make straight the way for the child to fulfil its destiny – a task requiring honesty, not indoctrination.

Blight on a Child’s Innocence

Socially acceptable trends impacting a child’s right to childhood are often pushed by people who are childless, who seek life’s meaning through OPC (other people’s children).

To conserve simplicity and innocence in childhood, we must be alert to, and speak out against oppressive trends we know to be counter to our values and harmful to children: lunchtime porn; abortion; gender fluidity; guilt for colonialism without countervailing value of benefits and inevitability; guilt for environmental damage without contextual understanding of solutions.

When a well indoctrinated nine-year-old with a persuasive writing task argues mining is bad because it kills thousands of people, one realizes just how damaging is educational indoctrination to the unformed and uninformed mind. The child remained unpersuaded when presented with facts from government reports that only 14 people had been killed on mining sites in a year, as well as the substantial financial contribution mining makes to the economy to pay for schools and hospitals. Enormous damage is done to childhood innocence when expectations are beyond the comprehension of the child, and when context and prospects for solutions are absent.

Using children as pawns in family law disputes is reprehensible, as is childhood neglect, sexual and physical abuse, pedophilia, and the ultimate harm perpetrated by Hamas: using children as hostages, human shields, their death glorified as promos for sympathy to their cause from the useful idiots pontificating from a global stage.

Christmas Treasure

We are powerful in the face of appalling stupidity pervading on a global scale. We have charge over our own lives. We can treasure our children, holding them close, in love, delighting in their innocence while wising them up to the vagaries of the world, inspiring hope in creative solutions and their power to affect change.

Well done to you good and faithful servants who remain true. May the spirit inspire you with peace, joy and hope, as replenishment for the year ahead.

Merry Christmas and may 2024 prove promise fulfilled.

Fantasy has a strong following in movies, books, games and TV. J K Rowling became a billionaire writing entertaining fantasy stories for children that encouraged reading, yet, I feel, may have undermined capacity of children to deal with reality. No magic wand to wave over work to be done to care for yourself or attain success.

Just how capture by fantasy can overtake fact was revealed on an occasion when tutoring writing to two primary school boys. I asked the boys to write an historical account of Captain Cook’s discovery mapping eastern Australia searching for a suitable place for sustainable settlement. In response the boys related the “gem” of his discovery (Sydney Harbour), as treasure on a map that disintegrated when found by French Captain La Perouse. Cook’s maps focused on Botany Bay, omitting Sydney harbour from the map in keeping with British Admiralty’s orders for secrecy.

Characteristics of Unicornia

So that you might recognize the fantasy world of Unicornia when you encounter it, be alert to the characteristics, readily recognized in hindsight of the groundswell of public capture in Covid and Hitler’s Germany with rampant hatred of the Jews. Watch for:

• Governing ideas derived in the minds of elite, who accumulate wealth and comfort.
• Cost and burden imposed on the less powerful, their money, businesses and lives.
• Mobs under capture: individual responsibility and capacity to think foregone.
• People categorized as either oppressor (bad) or oppressed (good) to warrant appropriate moral response.
• Malevolent menace of violence; dire outcomes exercised to maintain control.
• Truth becomes as scarce as humour, when misinformation/disinformation rule, betraying prospects and freedom for people
• Destruction – of the best of western civilization; of buildings, ecology, people, communities, families and faith – to be subject to some ancient, unreformed belief or newer global Gaia.
• No generative plan other than domination
• Oblivious to past tragedies following the same scripts: Nazism, Fascism, Marxism, Communism, Islamism. We’ve seen the end of this movie before: hundreds of millions die, sacrificed to the new and old deities.

Now let’s explore a few Unicornian fantasies currently ruling our lives:  

Aboriginal Dreamtime Unicornia

As far as I can glean from prominent activists, Aborigines want to turn back history, take us back to the stone age of Dreamtime mythologies, yet do so by obstructing western capitalist development that pays for them. Legal systems protecting them are used for destruction. Confused!

Aboriginal Dreamtime mythologies handed down orally anchor cultural values and spiritual and kin-based relationships in the land. Aboriginal people know that sacred sites can be dangerous places and believe sites play an important part in their health and well-being. Never mind sanitation and modern medicine.

Straddling the barbed wire fence between mythology and modernity is fraught with risks for all parties. Educated activists have exploited modernity’s legal systems, as well as respect for Aboriginal culture and financial largesse to disrupt development, claim harm and win financial recompense for the “oppressed”.

Claims of “secret women’s business” that delayed for years construction of a bridge to Hindmarsh Island in SA disintegrated when revealed to the Royal Commission as a fabrication.

As an example, more recently, proposals for development of offshore gas from the Burrup Hub in WA have been delayed by custodians of the rock art petroglyphs who want to be able to say no, as climate change caused by development miles offshore will fade the rock art that is said to have lasted thousands of years.

The Aboriginal industry already receives $33billion annually, additional to a National Indigenous Australian Agency funded for $2.1billion to manage services, education and culture. Legal protests are taxpayer funded.

People must apply for access to the 55% of Australia already under aboriginal control, while mythological sacred sites are being locked up at an alarming rate, with huge penalties for default: Uluru, the Grampians, Mt Warning, and soon Glass House Mountains. Makes a farce of the smoking ceremonies and “welcome to country” diatribe when we are increasingly made unwelcome in our own country while being expected to pay for it.

Recent failure of the voice referendum shed a light on the intentions of the 4% Aborigines, many       lighter skinned than I am, to control us all by way of modernity’s constitution. Many supporters voted yes and protested, under capture of the vibe, never missing an opportunity to display pretentious moral superiority.

Hamas Islamic Unicornia

Hamas terrorists are presently living their Unicornian dream of death and martyrdom, invited by decades of conflict against Israel, culminating in a barbaric attack against Israeli citizens. As common with Unicornian dreamers, Hamas leaders live in billionaire luxury in Qatar and elsewhere, while their foot soldiers face Allah and the IDF in the tunnels under Gaza, hiding behind Palestinian civilians.

Despite repeated offers of land for peace, Palestinian leaders have never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. A two-state solution will never be agreed upon, because Hamas and Palestinian protocols require the extermination of all Jews and elimination of them “from the river to the sea” (i.e., from the River Jordan in the east to the Mediterranean Sea on the west). Apparently one Jewish state is too much amongst 53 Arab states.

For over a hundred years, Arabs have cultivated a hatred of the Jews, seeking their extermination in collaboration with Russia, Nazi Germany and other rogue states. That is why the “final solution”, the holocaust, that cost the lives of over 6 million Jews, was kept hidden for so long and even today is often denied. Neither are Arabs averse to killing other Arabs: in recent times, half a million have been disposed of in Syria by Assad, violence, death and starvation flourish in Yemen.

Islam, established 1400 years ago by an uneducated charismatic leader Mohammad, now has an estimated 1.8 billion adherents and is the fastest growing religion in the world, mainly throughout the Middle East. So much for genocide. Although claiming to be a religion of peace, interpretations of Islam have lent readily to dishonesty, brutality and slaying of infidels (us) and Jews in countless terror attacks, like the twin towers in New York and barbaric slaughter of 1400 and kidnapping of 240 innocent Jews on 7 October 2023. Cries from terrorists of, Allah is great! Death to America! Death to Israel! Curse the Jews! Victory to Islam! Are hardly the stuff of peace. Where’s their sense of humour?

Christian religions went through the Reformation to produce exceptional science, music, art, culture and development that has brought so many out of poverty and disease. Philosophical debate and free speech honed laws of respect and equality. Aboriginal Dreamtime and Islam similarly need thorough Enlightenment to reconcile beliefs with modernity, whose tools they use against the people who created them for everyone’s benefit. Not holding my breath.

Global threats of jihad against anyone depicting Mohammad or defiling a Qu’ran, demonstrated in massacre of French cartoonists, has meant that people are reluctant to criticise Islam. Yet more recently scholars following historical timelines of the evolution of Islam reveal that the Qu’ran was not written till a couple of hundred years after Mohammad’s death and, with the Hadith (Mohammad’s sayings), has been edited since. No excuse then for not undertaking an holistic review of current beliefs and practices given the horrendous outcomes. Reformation of the Unicornian fantasy would seem better than taking over the world by violence and outbreeding.

Net Zero Unicornia

Without a scrap of evidence that global boiling is occurring, or that humans cause it, global religious zealotry has taken hold in a wave of onerous pressure on the productive west, to take us back to medieval times.

The Unicornian fantasy of Energy and Environment Minister Chris Bowen is that Australia will reach the promised land of Net Zero by 2030 dedicated to the global Gaia in the UN of failed predictions. We’ll do so by destroying the landscape ecology and productive land, paving the country with unrecyclable giant windmills, acres of solar panels, tens of thousands of kilometres of transmission lines, with energy lost in transmission over distances, all subsidized by mug taxpayers.

According to Leninist diktats of Klaus Schwab of the WEF, we’ll own nothing and be happy. Once a few centuries ago, coal saved the west when trees were being cut down to fuel the furnaces to make glass. Industrial use of coal saved the trees while raising billions out of poverty and starvation. Getting rid of coal and other fossil fuels will take us back to poverty and starvation, our energy and national security sacrificed on the holy altar of the Unicornian global boiling fantasy. Sri Lanka and California are precursors to our coming fate.

Pandemic Unicornia

Hardly have we emerged from the farcical Orwellian controls of COVID that ruined so many lives and businesses, than we are threatened with a replay for any future pandemic. So enamored are the elites with the power they were able to exert, that Australia is being asked by the WHO to sign up to global pandemic controls to which we will all be subject, under severe penalty. Seems there is no end to unelected bureaucratic stupidity.

China Dream Unicornia

President of China for Life, Xi Jinping, has a Unicornian dream that China will rule the world (under him). His strategy is to dominate the planet by focusing on six spheres of influence: the economy, military, global diplomacy, technology, education and infrastructure has been brilliantly crafted and executed.

Already forcibly taken under China’s control are Tibet, Hong Kong, the LAC region in northern India and the South China Sea, with ominous threats against Taiwan and islands of Vietnam, Philippines, Cambodia and Indonesia. The Belt and Road initiative uses cheque book diplomacy to gain access to assets in failing economies to spread influence around the world. The Ukraine war provides cover for currency movements where the renminbi will replace the US dollar as the global standard.

Supposedly Xi’s strategy redresses the 100 years of western dominance of China, unsubtly brushing under the carpet, the 40-60 million killed by their own during Mao’s rampage to Communism, as well as the intelligentsia killed, jailed, humiliated or sent to re-education camps on farms during the Cultural Revolution. No wonder China had to steal IP, cheat and lie to make good on opportunities lost. Woke Marxist indoctrination in our education system ensures Australian education goes backwards, ripe for China pickings. No Net Zero then!

Recognised as China’s Solzhenitsyn, author Ma Jian crafted an insightful dystopian novel, China Dream, a play on Xi’s own China Dream. In the book fact and fiction are woven into an expose of the damage inflicted on a nation’s soul when authoritarian regimes, driven by an insatiable hunger for power, seek to erase memory, rewrite history, and falsify the truth. China Dream is a dystopian vision of repression, violence, and state-imposed amnesia that is set not in the future, but in China today.

What’s next for us?

We should wonder what’s next for us at a time when the Unicornian fantasies of vain and avaricious men want to take over control of the world via destruction of their own people and others:

• Putin going to war to “restore” Russian grandeur.
• China to dominate the world.
• Islamists to dominate the world of infidels, free of Jews, with the help of Iran.
• North Korea to dominate North Korea (not hard to do when the people are ignorant; obedient and starving) while tossing a few rockets to the USA.
• At home, Marxist Greens to dominate the Australian polity.

We in the west are seen as racist oppressors while providing the benefits of Enlightenment for all. The “oppressed” seek revenge for knowledge made generously available, earnestly trying to take us all back to antiquity, where they’re comfortable, rewriting history.

Trouble is, had they thought it through, they would realise that intelligent innovation developed in the west, which they use while turning against us, will dry up like an Arab or Gobi Desert once deprived of freedoms – of thought, capital, science, education, movement.

As low affection between Arabs and Chinese is mutual, perhaps they will continue to destroy their own and each other and leave us in the west to clean out destructive weak, woke policies and restore the grandeur of our culture and faith.

The Nobel Prize winning author and astute observer of human nature, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, believed,

“The line separating good and evil does not pass through states, classes or political parties. It passes through the human heart”.

In my blogs I try to relate how high-level policy affects us personally, as well as how our personal inclinations affect policy.

For instance, the global renewable energy crusade for ‘net zero’ pumps up our energy bills to be unaffordable at home, increasing costs of all goods produced. We get inflation.

At the same time, light is shone on individual responsibility for contributing to that policy by supporting cults, corporations, policies and political parties capitalising on the farcical hoax of catastrophic global boiling. Getting your rocks off on the heart’s store of moral passion while dealing out contempt for denialists contributes to the global groundswell that consumes resources and harms the poor. We are culpable.

 According to Martin Luther King, “Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity”.

In all this, an activist media lazily fails to seek and report facts, instead promoting the narrative approved by ruling elites, usually from the left, mostly seeking destruction of western civilization.

Yet we could be enlightened by the wisdom of ancients to look to our heart’s store:

“The good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks” (Luke 6:45).

Hatred and love are both treasures of the human heart, multipliers of evil and good. We can examine our own responsibility for manifestation of these for good or bad in our own life and the broader society by looking at how we deal with hate and love personally, as well as on a global scale as depicted in prevailing global topics such as Trump, Israel, Covid and global boiling.

Trump

For all his personal failings and fragility, former President Donald Trump did a might of good in the USA and in the world. Furthermore, he did so while under constant, egregious assault by the Washington swamp, mainstream media, a DOJ weaponized by the Democratic party. TDS Trump Derangement Syndrome became part of the lexicon. Few people could have withstood such attacks to remain functioning.

TV commentator and author Mark Levin, outlines in his book Unfreedom of the Press, pages of slurs slung at Trump in the media: that he was a drunk, deranged, demented. Trump does not drink and has easily passed physical and mental tests affirming his sanity and capability. Mostly, judgement of Trump has been based on his Twitter excess to 80 million followers and failure to accept the outcome of the very questionable 2020 election.

By comparison let us examine a few of the things done by Trump, reversed by the Biden, and the impact on the USA and the world. Our view of Trump may be challenged.

Trump	Biden
Made America energy independent, filled oil reserves at low price, shoring up national security; encouraged further exploration.	Diminished national security by cancelling the XL pipeline nearing completion, putting ally Canada offside; now buys oil from rogue states Venezuela and Iran; sells off some oil reserve to China, depleting stock; prevents exploration for fossil fuels in the interest of net zero fantasy.
Built the border wall; negotiated with Mexico to stand 28,000 troops on the border with USA to enforce “stay in Mexico policy”; dramatically reduced illegal immigration.	Diminished national security: stopped building the wall; allowed illegal immigrants and drugs to flood over putting enormous pressure on border officers, towns and ranches; over 8 million illegal immigrants have crossed during Biden’s term; southern border now run by Mexican cartels; over 100K young Americans die in a year from fentanyl poisoning.
Showing peace through strength, maintained relationships with global rogue leaders Xi Jinping, Putin, Kim Jong Un. Put the wood on the Mullahs of Iran, cancelling Obama’s farcical nuclear deal; changed the dynamics of the Middle East by establishing the Abraham Accords, working relationships between Israel, Bahrain, UAE, Egypt, Morocco, with Saudi Arabia in the offing. Moved the US embassy to Jerusalem; no new wars started; no American soldiers killed.	Biden’s weakness has been catastrophic for the USA and the world, emboldening global rogues: the horrendous exit from Afghanistan costing 13 soldiers their lives and 200 injured, leaving behind $84bn military assets and lives of people in danger; Putin emboldened to invade Ukraine; released $6bn frozen assets to Iran, which uses the money to fund terrorist organisations Hamas and Hezbollah to invade Israel; US apparent weakness incentivises Xi Jinping to move on Taiwan.
Renegotiated the NAFTA agreement for more beneficial terms for US; renegotiated trade deal with China for $500bn improvement, allowing better returns to mid-west farmers for their production; tightened copyright laws to minimize China theft of IP.	Maintains most of Trump’s policy, yet soft on China.
Attained the highest ever employment of blacks, Latinos and women; provided secure funding of black colleges and charter schools; enacted the First Step Act, a pathway to release for non-violent felons.	Biden’s policies spiked inflation putting pressure on families, small businesses and jobs
Accepted $1/year pay as President, sending his salary to charity.	Biden and his family have grown wealthy on “pay for access” from Russia, China, Ukraine, Romania, risking security of the US.

We would do well to reflect on whether our own opinions of Trump, fed by a fetid, prejudiced media, contributed to the global groundswell of individual hatred and the impact it has had on the current world order.    

Israel/Palestine

Seething antisemitic hatred of Jews and Israel has a 3500-year history in the “promised land”, marked by invasion, exodus and return, along with many attempts at genocide of the Jews. In the 1930s Hitler’s emerging threat of extermination led many Jews previously exiled to Europe and Russia, to buy up land for settlement in what is now recognized as Israel, then controlled by Turkey, and after the war, by Britain.

Following the holocaust that cost the lives of 6 million, Jews declared never again! Determined at last to fight back, they established their own land and laws under the UN/British brokered Balfour Declaration in 1948. Arabs declared war on Israel the same day.

Jews exiled to Eastern Europe, Russia and north Africa who survived the holocaust, gravitated to their origins, joining those who had remained in Israel under Arab colonization. Jordan then controlled the West Bank and Egypt the Gaza.

In his book, The War on the West, Douglas Murray examines the work of great philosophers who find that “ressentiment” is one of the greatest drivers for people who want to destroy: blaming someone else for having something you believe you deserved more. I know from personal experience this happens often on a personal level. The term justice is used to sanctify revenge, the ultimate form of revenge being to turn happy people into unhappy people like themselves.

How true is this of the Middle East! Under the vision and drive of PM Netanyahu, Israel has made the desert bloom, to become a technology powerhouse, an attractive trading partner amongst oil rich nations of the Middle East. As living standards in Israel rose, 20K guest workers a day also prospered crossing from Gaza to work in burgeoning industry, earning higher wages and making a better living. Reason enough to destroy the people, the promise of good and potential peace with ever festering hatred in the heart of Palestinians.

Dangerous “conscientious stupidity” of ‘useful idiots’ rallying for Palestine at the Sydney Opera House commemorating Jews massacred, calling for extermination of the Jews and Israel from the river to the sea, show a level of irrational hatred in the hearts of people to whom has been extended generous hospitality of free settlement in Australia. Historical illiteracy abounds – never mind the facts. Not difficult to see from such objectionable behaviour in this country, why Israel has such a problem with the Palestinians no matter how much concession is made to them. Land for peace? No! Just Jews dead and gone from the river to the sea. Those rallying for Palestine are welcome to try their luck in Iran, the biggest sponsor of Hamas terrorism, to see how much freedom they would have there.

For entertainment our children watch videos such as Bluey at the Beach. Palestinian children are indoctrinated with hatred and death against Jews and Infidels. Small wonder the heart’s store of hatred eventually overflows in horrendous depravity experienced by 1400 peaceful Jews massacred and 220 hostages taken on 7 October.

Global boiling

The false narrative of global boiling is kept alive by the UN, WEF, State, Territory and local governments, under the guise of unattainable “net zero” ambitions, all the while failing in delivery of primary responsibilities taxpayers rightfully expect, like energy security, lights on, rates, roads and rubbish. Virtue signaling in the extreme comes at the cost of contempt for the poor who pay. Predictably the poor also are expected to stump up for the cost of destruction of landscape ecology and disposal of windmills and solar panels as they become obsolete. Solutions are yet to be found for disposing of toxic materials.

As MLK insightfully asserts, sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity rule.

Covid

It will be some time before we recover from the physical, financial and psychological harm caused by COVID. Imposition of mandates for masks, vaccinations and isolation brought out unnecessary hatred for fellow humans not seen to be doing their bit, no matter how foolish (and wrong) the edicts and controls turned out to be. Fights over toilet paper and the hording of essentials was incomprehensible, as was condemnation of others who believed differently. Differences are allowed in a free country. Police brutality against those protesting seemingly endless lockdowns, especially in Victoria, didn’t extend to Palestinian protests against Israel, threatening genocide. Occurrences such as these are indicative of an inverted justice system, protecting hatred and the accepted narrative. Never mind the law-abiding public.

Small wonder righteous haters feel affirmed in their passion, in their mindless obedience to new gods, soon to be legislated globally by WHO in their pandemic plan. Once Australia signs up, we will have no democratic health rights. Check out an explanation of what awaits us on the following link. https://youtu.be/kCoFLhDKlA4?si=RX-9NJBbziMypvWR

Love

The antidote to hate is love. Good and evil pass through every human heart, as Solzhenitsyn said. Each of us should be mindful of our own heart’s leanings.

Love is the foundation of our being, and love is what sustains us. Our identity is derived from love. The opposite is true: hatred never stops. It takes time before ignorance and a desire for things that will not be in the best interests of the individual are all that are left. Love fights against hatred in three ways: via forgiveness, compassion, and—most importantly—by staying in love. Anushka Joshi @keverythingJ

Love of family and country inspired near 400,000 Israelis with toughness to fight for their existence. Palestinians’ hatred of the Jews is greater than love of their own children, driving them to sacrifice innocents to the cause.

Australians have become so soft. Should the need arise, maybe we could marshal a fighting force from the army of welfare dependent people.

The title of this blog, “Let them eat cake”, is a quote attributed to French Queen Consort, Marie Antoinette who lost favour with the French public with extravagant displays at a time of severe hardship. Misreading the public mood when support for the monarchy depended on them, brought on the French Revolution and cost her head in 1793.

While Australians have never resorted to the guillotine for elite arrogance, ignorance and inconsideration of human struggles, they have been known to protest disruptively. Irish political convicts protested over-authoritarianism of British protestant military administration, erupting into riots such as Vinegar Hill (1804) and Eureka Stockade (1854). The shearers’ strike (1891) established power of unions and Catholic schools protest in Bathurst (1955) asserted the right of Catholics to educational funding from the tax pool to which they also contributed. Many rioted over Premier Daniel Andrews overreach, violent police controls and extortionate penalties during the world’s longest COVID lockdowns in Victoria.

Today many of us are struggling to meet the increasing cost of energy, mortgages, inflated prices for food and fuel. At the same time, we are subject to ever increasing intrusion into choices in our lives: what we eat, drink, what type of housing and where, no gas stoves, pressure for solar power and electric cars, control over children, their education and gender, what we say, think and practice faith.

Being told what to do suits some people: it means they don’t have to think too much and can exercise conspicuous virtue lording it over the rest of us. In doing so they fail to mature, fail to use their gifted intelligence for society’s betterment, at the same time as clouding the “light” of others.

In each of my blogs, as a policy tragic I try to link the impact of policies with what happens in our daily lives, as a service to those without the time or interest to do so. Until, of course, they come under pressure of hardship, like now, resulting from elite policies.

Let’s look at why people can’t pay their power bill, have to sell their house because they can no longer afford increased mortgage rates, and have difficulty feeding the family. Shamefully, many of the policies are founded on the sand of lies, poor basis for building a secure, flourishing nation.

Energy bills

The poor pay many times over for switching on their TV, cooking a meal, cooling/heating their home: in energy consumed; subsidies to suppliers; construction of additional transmission grid; and ultimately, for disposable of ‘unrenewables’ yet to be dealt with.

High level policy	Intention/action	Impact	Solutions
‘Net Zero’ to address global warming, driven by the UN and WEF, populated by elites	Save the planet Phase out coal and gas for “cheaper” renewables, and cars for electric	Elite get rich on subsidies Poor can’t afford to pay their energy bills. Small business closures, job losses, Transport costs increase, inflation rises, Energy supply becomes unreliable, patchy, pushing up prices Landscape ecology destroyed by wind and solar farms affecting food production and environment. Coal and gas, major export earners, demonized. Poor to pay additional costs for new transmission grid and yet to be resolved, waste management of ‘unrenewables’.	Stop believing the unproven ‘carbon’ cult fantasy. Newer gods can’t change the climate or part the Red Sea. Back coal, gas and nuclear energy, which are cheaper and less harmful. Vote accordingly.
Housing Buying your own home used to be a reasonable expectation, made affordable by considerate governments who understood the financial and social benefits of home ownership and produced policies to strengthen that knowledge. By contrast, today’s government, populated by elite politicians with multiple homes of their own, appears hopeless in empathizing with half the population who have no home and little likelihood of getting one. Social housing as a solution, centralizes housing policy to control the people.
High level policy	Intention/action	Impact	Solutions
No coherent policy to manage housing, population and immigration other than to avoid recession	1.5 million new immigrants planned; 464K already this year Social housing scheme planned will be mugged by reality of supply issues.	Pressure on housing supply; increased housing prices to unaffordable; people living in cars and tents; builders going broke. Supply failures: State government release of land, local government slow approvals; not enough tradies; increasing costs of construction materials. Per capita recession already happening.	Coordinate between local, state and federal governments on population, immigration, housing and essential infrastructure. Apply cost penalties for slow LG approvals, to be paid to developer. Speed housing development design with appropriate infrastructure
Fuel prices Inflated petrol prices for our cars are yet another function of high level policy, part of the “Net Zero” global fantasy, pushing electric vehicles, another unrenewable.
High level policy	Intention/action	Impact	Solutions
Net Zero policy of Australian government, UN, WEF	Remove all petrol and diesel cars from operation. Make all on/off road vehicles electric. Prevent exploration of minerals	Inflation increases as costs rise on everything transported. Price of fuel rises, putting pressure on budgets Elites become incredibly wealthy from government subsidies paid for by the poor. Additional infrastructure necessary to service electric vehicles, at cost to the poor. Pressure on electricity supply derived from unreliable renewables leads to blackouts (see California experience)	Stop believing the carbon cult fantasy. Plant trees. Protest policy stupidity that hurts the poor, enriches the elite and renders our national security vulnerable.

What we are facing is a distinct trend towards socialism with central control basic to Labor ideology, anchored in the belief government knows what is best for us. Large and expanding government bureaucracies seek to influence every aspect of our lives from cradle to grave, exercising authority and administering harsh punishment for non-compliance. The Palaszczuk government has added 50,000 more bureaucrats with no appreciable improvement in services. Big corporate and technology firms have been enlisted to collaborate with government. Corporate compliance is deemed essential, as favour is critical to winning work from government. Failed Marxist, Socialist and Fascist dictatorships are mere expansion of this model.

Conservative belief holds the individual, family and small business central. Freedom of speech, faith, thought and initiative are core values. People should be free to choose how and where to work, build businesses and homes, how to manage their food, families and body. Out of such dynamism and individual responsibility innovation and progress occur.

Australia’s “mixed” government model is a function of the size of the country to be serviced and the constrained finances of Britain at the time of colonization. Government needed to take over delivery of services such as roads, railways, water and communications, as private capital was constrained after the war of independence with the US. Extensive social services which evolved to support those  experiencing hard times, seemed to grow organically out of Indigenous “confidence in the hunt” – that there will be enough for everyone.

Families have their backs to the wall trying to manage the confluence of so many kitchen table issues, every one of which has its origins in bad government policy, taking a lead from bad international policy agreements, without responsibility. For instance, John Kerry, Biden’s “Climate Tzar”, has become a billionaire cruising the world in his private jet, even as none of his predictions over a couple of decades has been met.

Those less well-off have reached a turning point, having been crushed under the weight of stupidity and lies. Time to revolt in whatever way possible. At least support those who do protest. Demand that Australians be freed to explore, exploit and develop our god given natural resources to our own benefit, instead of the craven elite. We don’t want cake. We want wholesome food produced on our efficient farms, not plundered by green gods for solar, wind and transmission lines. For that we will have to become revolting.